541–550 of 740 posts
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Dropping stuff and falling are good examples. If you're paying attention, anyway. I can still grab stuff that's fallen maybe 10-20 cm, but by 50-100 cm it's moving way too fast.
That's a terrible example, why would pick an explicitly sub-exponential relationship?
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This post is exactly the essence of why I don't like politics. It's super easy to retrospectively say "they should've done something else". You might think that even you would do the right choice, but you are wrong. Such decision is hard for any authority. You may vote for any person in the whole world and the result would probably be similar. Lockdown delivered too early could send whole country into chaos. Also Chi…
Accountability is important. Also - doing nothing until it is too late - not even educating - is not even a choice. It's not a strategy. Its dereliction of duty.
Those are the conservative figures for influenza in the USA since 2019 November.
Where was your outrage last year and the year before. Couldn't we have prevented this influenza tragedy from happening all over again. Is this also dereliction of duty?
I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalism. What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I'm writing this from Barcelona, Spain. This last Sunday, 6 days ago, I went on a walk with my girlfriend, had a nice lunch, too…
There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February. We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it. Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and socc…
It might be worth revisiting top comments on HN threads relating to Covid19 in the past few weeks. Quite telling how much the 'know-it-all' folks actually know about the real world - makes you even more afraid that these are the same people who run countries and have an outsized influence in the public sphere.
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There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February. We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it. Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and socc…
> and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. There are scandals in the sciences too. Peer review rings, studies that tend toward positive bias due to the pressure to publish, some studies being paid by big companies that favors their vested interests, etc.
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> Go read HN comments from weeks and months ago, and see the posters encouraging prompt measures getting called paranoids. Exactly. Two weeks ago every coronavirus thread on Hacker News was full of deniers claiming this was no worse than the flu and this was all just media hysteria. Some probably still hold that opinion. I don't think they will be convinced until the hospitals start overflowing.
Elon Musk was one of the deniers. You would think someone who "always starts with physics" would know better.
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It’s far from clear how accurate those numbers for Italy and China are. China essentially gave up on testing the general population in Wuhan and their numbers mostly represent the most serious cases. Italy’s infections seem to be mostly centered around the elderly with 40% of infections in the 70+ age range despite 65+ year olds only representing 21.53% of their population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavi…
The WHO has verified China's numbers.
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Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. It's just too fast for our primitive brains. In some sense, we are standing in the middle of the road, frozen like deer in the headlights. Science is supposed to mitigate the shortcomings of our natural intuitions and cognitive biases. The problem is that most people are not scientists. When a non-scientist is asked to trust a scientist, he or she is subj…
It's so unfortunate that Western society also seems to be losing trust in experts. As the world gets more complicated one would expect that trust in experts would be more important.
As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, which means you can get almost everyone to obey, in one way or another. Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February. We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it. Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and socc…
Human beings do not intuitively understand exponential growth. It's just too fast for our primitive brains. In some sense, we are standing in the middle of the road, frozen like deer in the headlights. Science is supposed to mitigate the shortcomings of our natural intuitions and cognitive biases. The problem is that most people are not scientists. When a non-scientist is asked to trust a scientist, he or she is subj…
And I don't believe you should have to understand exponential growth to listen to clear government messaging about the severity of a problem. This is a failure of messaging by the relevant authorities.
As an Italian, I raise my eyebrows every time China is mentioned as an example for the successful containment of this virus. It could do that because it could afford to take the economical hit and because it is an authoritarian state, which means you can get almost everyone to obey, in one way or another. Also, the Chinese Party is what caused this mess to begin with, by allowing this virus to spread all around the w…
"China could afford to take the economical hit" The faster and better that you deal with it, the smaller the economic hit is going to be. China is going to be the big winner here.
The economy is going to be hit either way, it's just a choice between A) a lock down but most people staying alive and healthy or B) lots of people dying or sick and an overrun health care system.
Maybe we don't know which one will have bigger impact on the economy, but we know for sure which one will lead to more human suffering.